About Me

Spaid once slept in a
cemetery in Greece (it seemed like the safest place to spend the night outside). He was
forced off a bus in India by window-smashing rioters. He’s been robbed, and
mistaken for a thief, a priest, a concert pianist, Woody and Tony Blair. He was
examined by a dentist called Dr Fang. The rest isn't silence...

BBC Radio broadcast a
separate, humorous story set in South India. Like this story, tireless: reflects his
experiences in different countries and jobs.

An
Australian, he has travelled in over thirty countries, working as a language tutor
in Greece, Italy and Taiwan, as well as a teacher in India, Australia and the
UK, where he now lives with his wife.

From the author...

tireless: celebrates the creative
urge while satirizing the people who create.
I wanted to write a book that would keep attention on any page you
turned to, so the person who looked over your shoulder on the train to see what
you were reading would only look away when their station had come.

Harassed? Unloved?
Just watching life go by? Take
this hilarious ride through the narrator’s painful
world and find others who are even worse off than you. Next door you’ll meet
Jim and his outrageous
stories, the unattainable Olga, their dysfunctional children – as well as the
appalling Rat and his companion, Roquefort, who’ll work their way into your
life as they do with everybody else. In
thissatireon human behaviour,
they’re not fair, not fair at all.

The narrator, an
unemployed teacher and aspiring writer, lives in London.When Jim and Olga move in next door, his
imagination is fired by the unhappy wife’s nude sunbathing and the pompous
husband’s breathtaking tall stories.He
recalls his comic victories in the classroom, while fantasizing that Britain’s
south-east has broken off from the mainland.He remembers his own schooldays and considers the impact of young Miss
Bugler.These anecdotes, like Jim’s
stories, highlight the casual cruelties and misunderstandings in human
behaviour and the evasive nature of fulfilment.A turning point is Jim’s recollection of a night in India when he
hallucinated, suffering the taunts of the giant Rat and his close friend,
Roquefort, a miniature cat.Humiliated
by publishers’ rejections, by the rudeness of Jim’s daughter, Daisy, and even
by his barber, the narrator transfers his sense of failure to Rat, who enters
the narrative in a series of disturbing, yet uproarious adventures which merge
illusion with the real world.The
narrator removes the barber’s head, takes revenge on Daisy when she develops an
infatuation for him, and finally publishes something,
in contrast to a now unlucky Rat, who is arrested, almost has a nervous
breakdown, is refused restaurant service, anddisappoints
as an undergraduate at Oxford, where the noisy love-making of Bill and Penny
emphasises his loneliness.

‘A colon comes in handy
here, before examples: two dots on top of one another, like the cowboys who
copulate on Brokeback Mountain, on a slope so far away you need binoculars to
see them properly.’ ... from the chapter RAT
ARRESTED! in tireless: